"Science Fiction" means—to us—everything found in the science fiction section of a bookstore, or at a science fiction convention, or amongst the winners of the Hugo awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. This includes the genres of science fiction (or sci-fi), fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, and even stories with lighter speculative elements. We hope you enjoy the broad range that SF has to offer.

Science Fiction

Science fiction, even as a subgenre is a vast, underexplored country filled with unusual denizens, many of whom simply defy classification. Long way of saying this is the catch-all category for any stories that don't fit into our topic listings above. If too many of these selections start to form a natural cluster, we will allow a new topic to be born.
Until that time, enjoy the varied, murky melange that defines the undefined herein.

What exactly are the Zala? Clearly, they're intelligent. They look like craggy, grey, four-armed, walking trees, each of which has a nest of hive-insect-like creatures buried in the distended front of their abdomens. The "insect" creatures scurry up and down the craggy bodies, mending injuries and, I've been warned, spraying jets of acid at the slightest hint of a threat.
So are these beings a species, or the hybrid result of a symbiotic system? Did the insect creatures play a role in facilitating the Zala's development or evolution as a highly intelligent civilization?

The gap between Ted's front teeth opened onto a solar system buzzing with civilizations of light and power. Every once in a while it would glint and draw the eye of Becky Cooley, the shy paralegal with the 84% compatibility rating from the dating website.
Ted found that trying to laugh behind his hand was awkward. Trying to tilt his head down while he spoke was awkward. He'd lost dates to awkwardness and to the bushy mustache he had used to curtain his upper teeth for a few weeks in June.

I had just gotten home from work, ready to start dinner for myself, when the phone rang. It wasn't even 5:30 yet, but the dinner hour is exactly when phone solicitors like to prey on customers. I answered with a "Hello" that was more like a sigh.
"Ronnie! Are you all right? We're so worried!" Not a salesman then--my parents, back in Wisconsin.

The model is privileged to work at the Albury-Wodonga Academy of Fine Arts and Neuroscience. Work permits are few and she needs to send half her ration to family up in the burning lands round Newcastle way. She has excellent references, but that doesn't count for much; the proof will be in her flesh, her stamina, her strength of will.
She removes her clothes in a dark change room. Someone has let a can of drink fall on its side and sticky Cack congeals on the bench--a waste of good, if foul tasting, nutrient. She removes her clothes, top half first: a soft crochet hat, elbow high fingerless gloves and three layers--soft hemp undershirt, polyurethane mid layer, thick wool shell. The whole lot pulled up and over her head in a single gesture, an easy, familiar motion. She folds them neatly and places them in her bag. She pulls off her shoes, lines them up on the scratched linoleum, then removes the bottom half: poly-leggings under button-fly goat leather, hemp underwear, wool socks, removed in a similar single gesture. Folds the pants in on themselves and places them in her bag. She stretches one arm, then the other, shakes her legs and thinks through possible poses and energy she will bring to the class. She lives to do her job well--she loves to see how artists develop and grow and make classes come to life with potentia.

Dearest Elizabeth, forgive me. The light is dim, and my hand trembles. The enemies of God have me under guard, but there is a maid who pities me. She brought me these instruments, and I pray she will take my letter to you when I have finished.
You have heard many monstrous things about me. None of them are true. I will tell you the truth, from the beginning, though the story will be long. Please, believe me.

The small grey man walked into Ben Murphy's office and stared at him with enormous black eyes. Ben had seen a lot during his fifteen years as Sheriff of Chaves County, but nothing like this naked, spindly-limbed, huge-headed critter. For that matter, he couldn't rightly say whether the thing was a man or not, despite the lack of pants. Still, Ben knew the value of remaining calm and helpful, whatever the situation.
"Can I help you?" he asked.

Twenty-two years from now, on a bright day in a dim room, your husband will utter his last words. He will tell you he is sorry for the time he squandered chasing fruitless theories, time made precious to him now by the power of hindsight. "You were my greatest discovery," he will say.
The two of you will spend the nine years prior to his end on a new beginning, one free of his long nights tinkering in the lab and obsessing over notes. He will be yours for the duration of long walks through blossoming gardens, sunny days that do not cloud over save for those rare moments where he will stare unfocused, his poor, brilliant mind a million miles away as it tries to discover where his science failed.

Swear to God, that's what the sign said: Quantum Mechanics. A faded, peeling sign on a rickety garage on a weed-choked lot. I looked out the window from the little Mexican taqueria across the street, and it still said: "Quantum Mechanics." Damn misleading.
"What's misleading?" the cook asked without turning.

"I love your hands," she says.
Her date lifts their hand from where it covers hers on the tablecloth between them, stares at it briefly. "Funny you should say that. No one ever noticed my hands before." They lower their hand, squeeze hers briefly. "I am a pilot; I guess I need good hands."

Nobody ever asked me the secret to survival. You didn't ask either, but I'll tell you anyway.
It's cowardice, O-hana, so that's how we'll survive. You and I and all the others in our cave--with a million tiny acts of cowardice.

Hachi Station was jumping for a Restday Eve. Marina had enough of the crowd and headed for the door when a man showed up in an illegal purple haze, leaving Marina in a coughing fit for inhaling the dust.
"Hey!" The last thing she wanted to do was get any closer to the newcomer, but apparently he didn't check the rules before landing. Someone needed to set him straight, and since most of the patrons were hybrids with gill flaps over their intakes and submerged in the various hot pools, none of them were going to bother. It was bad enough she was a landwalker in a bar full of hybrids, she also happened to be a veteran auditor and compulsive rule upholder. She really should have stayed in tonight.

After the bombs rained like fire and the riots faded, my daughter and I found ourselves alone in her room, our home surrounded by silence so deep it gouged my soul. The grandfather clock downstairs chimed once an hour, and rattled too, the cracked glass panel vibrating with the chimes. In the silence between chimes, Cara's heart beat too quietly, too slow, and out of sync.
Cara squeezed my arm, her breath labored and her face pale, like the ghost she was in danger of becoming. "Mama, am I dying?"

She doesn't know you can't have both a rebel starfighter and a colonial interceptor dogfight in the same tattoo. The pair of ships that streak up the outside of her left calf and all the way around to the inside of her thigh is a travesty, though you have to admit it's dead sexy. Like her green skin, it got your attention.

Unlike sex, you're probably going to enjoy the first part of this transmission more than the very end. I know you'll remember that when you find out what sex is. For now, I just meant to hook your attention. If you're opening your eyes, it means I have been killed. Company policy states that the exact nature of my death cannot be downloaded from my Circuito Mater. This is done to prevent biases in how future agents conduct their duty. You don't know it yet, but you won't want to die.

He cleared his throat, a thunderclap in the silence.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank you for indulging an elderly man, and express my gratitude that so many have attended. To those watching from all over our planet, I hope humanity can share this moment. That is why, instead of publishing in a journal where only a fraction will read and understand this breakthrough, I have chosen this unusual method of communicating a scientific discovery."

I remember the day my father died. I imagined I could see him smiling down at me, as he soared high above. For a brief moment he had flown, just as he'd said he would--like Daedalus on wings of silver. Then suddenly it had all ended and he'd gone falling to earth, plummeting and spinning like a broken bird. I'd watched it all because as my mother screamed, she'd forgotten to shield my eyes.
Daddy was a tinkerer, that's what mother used to call him. He was a welder by trade, and I remembered him coming home in the afternoons, dungaree overalls and jacket smelling of sweat and soot. But in his spare time he did love to tinker, to talk about machines and the way things worked. I was amazed at how he could take things apart and then rebuild them--knowing where every cog, washer, and screw went back with ease. He could talk about Jules Vernes and da Vinci for hours. And he made sure I knew about Elijah McCoy, the black inventor whose picture he kept in his garage. That was where Daddy made his inventions, odd contraptions he'd fashioned out of old appliances and parts he'd scoured from junk heaps. Most of them didn't work. A few sputtered and died or even blew up right in front of us. But that never stopped him. He kept going through his few successes and many failures.

"How about this: they only think they've been kidnapped by aliens. They wake up in their beds and realize they dreamed it all."
"Been done." the Director said without much interest, letting a long slow plume of smoke escape from his lips.

Heads. Most people wouldn't decide to ship out to the colonies on a coin flip, but we're not most people, right babe? When they said you wouldn't come out of the coma I had the medical team transmute your consciousness into a gold coin. The head is your lovely face; the "tail" on the back is a double helix segment of your DNA. You're in my pocket forever, my lucky piece. You know how we used to fight--no, not really fight... love fights, little kitten tussles--about who got to make the decisions? Well now it's all you. I flip the coin, you decide what we do. You are still in there, aren't you?
Heads. I'll upload my consciousness to the shipboard computer, and put my body in stasis. Your coin will remain safely in my pocket, keeping my body company for a trip that will take decades for you but only an instant for my uploaded mind. You know me so well, babe. You know I desperately want to see the colony itself, and not languish for decades on a stinking colony ship, only to die en route or arrive too old to enjoy our new life. I hear it's like the Wild West out there. Cash for the taking, if a man is bold enough to stake it. I hear you saying reckless, but you're wrong. Not reckless. Brave.

Really, Harry shouldn't have been surprised. It was one of the most common death predictions. Still, they said no matter what your verdict, it was hard, seeing it in print. So yeah, it bothered him when the machine spit out his: a little slip of paper, like you'd find in a fortune cookie, with three words: Collision with car.
Oh, it certainly could have been worse. It could have been something slow and lingering, like AIDS (he hadn't exactly been careful), or tawdry like Beaten to death by ex-wife. That wouldn't have surprised him either--she blamed him for everything. He was a handsome guy. He was supposed to resist every woman that threw herself at him?

They came to a stop. Bismuth helped him out of the car. His leg sent him a spike of pain as he stepped onto the grass. They walked through the crowd toward the white door, the people parting to let him through. Cobalt saw his classmates and friends; some smiled and nodded at him, some looked away whispering. All looked nervous.
They reached the door and Bismuth opened it. "A new Citizen will exit from this room."
Cobalt stepped through the doorway and it latched shut behind him.

John and I bought Katie a domino run for her eighth birthday. She and I spent all morning setting it up, lines of colored tiles all around the house. When it was done we held hands and tapped the first one, and watched as they began to topple.

The two-year-old in the corner clutches her collection of candy wrappers and odd papers to herself as if they were dragon's horde. The stripped vault I've closed us in--me and twenty-seven children--shudders once, twice, and the already dim lighting wanes; the two-year-old looks briefly up toward the lights set around the edges of the metal ceiling, but is far more interested in the crinkling sound of her treasures.
We've been in the vault too long. The sealed room smells of a day's worth of urine and worse. Resilient, adaptable, none of the children cry out at this latest attack. The wispy hair that frames the two-year-old's face seems to glow even in the low light, and I find myself wondering if all two-year-olds look as cherubic. Not that I really care.

"Sebastian, come look!" Madeleine called her brother to come and see what she had found. It was not the first time.
"Not now, Maddy. Pitches'll sack me if I'm late again." Sebastian pulled on the palm guards he had made from a tire. They protected his hands and helped him grip the sharp edges of the metal drums he spent his days fashioning into walls and roofs. It had been a great find. As well as the palm guards he had been able to put new soles on their sandals and make Maddy pads for her shins and elbows. She was always picking up scrapes and bruises gleaning with the other scavs who were too young or too old for other work.

She dashed into the station, elbowing through the press of travelers that choked the main concourse. A glance at the departure display told her his transport would embark in another minute. Her heart thundered in her chest as she raced to the platform. He never liked to board until the last moment. He might still be there. She'd been a fool to let him go yesterday, but she'd been afraid. Not anymore. The certainty she'd never see him again had clinched the decision in her heart. She couldn't let him leave like this. She'd never forgive herself.

She had always been somewhat pale in complexion. But now, as she stood before me in moonlight outside my front door, she seemed positively without color at all.
I do not mean her lips, of course. Drusilla's lips have always been a deep, blood red. Some say she does not even need to use lipstick. And her hair, dark chestnut, which some say she dyes, reflects as well as much a notion of violence and death as it does of healthy life.

Fina kept her aim steady. This would be the eighth time she'd watched Neil die--his face contorting in agony under the blue-white haze of the Abbey's limelight. The tight zoom of her camera caught every detail, including the wrinkles in the fabric backdrop bearing meticulously painted palm trees, the tufts of batting peaking from sloppy seams on the prop horses, and even the tremble of her husband's hands as theatrical blood dripped from the wound in his abdomen.
Neil's death scene wasn't supposed to go on for this long. Fina tensed as the unnerving sound of seams ripping whispered all around her. She worried that there wouldn't be enough time to capture the end of the play. Her entire project would be ruined.

There is a monster under my bed. I know because it followed me home from school.
I could call for help, but I'm afraid what Dad will do. He was so mad about my suspension. He never hits me, but even when he was through with his 'Jason-dammit', he kept shouting at the TV.

Keep me safe, keep me safe, keep me safe, you say over and over and over again. It races through your mind on a single track, like a runaway train of fear, gathering momentum while careening on an ever-downward slope. It is not as if you want to be here, thrust into the controlled chaos of the Big Bad City with its noisy cars and mobs of temporary people. Dislikes aside, you need to eat, need to work, need to survive all on your meager single girl budget. This is a far cry from Grover's Corners indeed, where heliotrope perfumes the air and not the dried urine of bums.
Even your Sentinel is an expense you scrimp to afford. And the clean-shaven salesman with the borrowed suit was so earnest about the tragic tales of a friend of a friend who, parroting the recycled stories that never lead back to anyone real. He recommended the Sentinel and you pretended to consider the option. Fantasy or otherwise, the singular threat lives and breathes, skulking around corners and lurking just out of reach of the feeble light from the mocking streetlamps.

I stare at my sleek, new veggie spiralizer with disdain. It's a simple contraption--dual funnels attached at the narrow ends, with severely sharp blades tucked inside, promising to turn any vegetable into long strings of gluten-free goodness. But I don't care how much meat sauce I dump on it, there's no way zucchini noodles will satisfy me like the hearty chew of durum wheat spaghetti.
Effin' Paleo diet.

There's blood in the sink. She coughs again, and now there's a tiny brass gear. I hold her hair back, remembering ill-spent Friday nights.
"It's a secret," she says. Her lips and tongue are red. "It has to be."

"Hello?" Maxim tapped his thumb on the keyboard, "Hi, can I be put through to customer service?" he shivered--without power the temperature had dropped ten degrees. He couldn't even boil the kettle for a cup of coffee or make breakfast for the children. Oh crap, they are going to go nuts when the batteries drain on their tablets. Maxim checked his own phone, 76%. That should last him a while.
"Hello, yes my power is out." He waited for the automated response.

I've missed you.Every Astran orbit, I make the light-years' journey back to see you. I file the paperwork, rearrange my schedule, pack, and bring my children with me. We endure the cold of hyperspace, the lingering headache and nausea. And now we're standing on your doorstep, in the cool Earth spring.

"Happy Birthday, Elspeth!"
She's just come back to her office to drop off a stack of papers to grade, and Luisa's greeting has interrupted her departure. Right away, the words are wrong: the "happy" and the "birthday" too cheerful, and the name too formal. Everyone calls her Elle, and Luisa of all people should know that this is a birthday she is loath to acknowledge. As far as Elle is concerned, all important people achieve success before they turn 30, and one year closer to her deadline is nothing to celebrate.

Gerard sat in the awkward waiting-room chair, bouncing his right leg up and down. The door from the scanning room opened and Emily walked out. She gave him a smile, but he saw it didn't reach her eyes. She hurried across the room and sat in the chair beside him.
A moment later, she set her hand on his knee. He stopped bouncing his leg.

He held it as delicately as an injured bird. "This is very old," he said, turning it over and looking at the stamp pasted on the old Aerogramme. "The postmark is smudged, but the year looks like 1989. I see no date on the letter. Where did you find it?"

Some of the bodies, a corpse runner ain't ever gonna return home.
It's not that I don't got compassion at the sight of the dead soldiers in the ditches. Honestly, I don't give a damn if they've got a leg blown off by the sonic cannons, even if it's gonna drip blood all over my wagon. It won't even matter if they got on the gold uniform of the West, or the crimson one from the East, because I make corpse runs both ways. All that matters is if the identification chip is still readable, and beneath that uniform, be it gold trimmed or crimson lined, is there a tin locket around their necks.

On the observation deck of the terraforming ship Lifebringer, Commander Therro watches the surface of the planet below burn on the screens before him. Flames writhe and smoke boils, and sometimes he catches a glimpse of tall, thin figures moving through the destruction without concern. They're the cause of it, after all.
He flicks a switch to change his view. Abruptly, he sees one of the twenty-foot tall humanoids walking stiff-legged across the screen. This one is apparently female, breasts and hips are visible beneath the thin blue fabric that shrouds her, although having seen the creatures in the flesh she's too towering and sinewy for him to think of her as a "her."

Lacey hunkered behind the thick oak tree, the thin fabric of her nightgown not enough to protect her from the scratchy bark. Strange green lights flickered distantly, sweeping over the yard. No fair, she thought. Jason hadn't told her they were using lights tonight; just covered her mouth when the booming thunder woke her up and told her to hide.
She didn't dare move or it would give away her position. They played this often enough in the dark for her to know how to win. Whenever Jason was seeker, he always found her, like he knew just where she planned on hiding. Tonight would be different.

She only had one photo on her profile, and it was blurry. I don't usually go on dates with people who hide their face, online dating being what it is. It's not that I was afraid she'd be unsightly--it's that she was hiding something, and I don't like mysteries. But I took a chance and met her for coffee.
When I got to the cafe, I saw her sitting there with a cup of coffee jittering in her hand. It shook like it was her tenth cup of the day. And she was still blurry. I sat down and made small talk. I rubbed my eyes. I blinked. I wondered if I was going blind.

After years of controversial experimentation, Dr. Abram Winthrop successfully manipulated the building blocks of human life. The process started in a petri dish, grew too big, moved to a test tube. The test tubes got progressively larger, and from then on it was incubators and operating tables with leather straps and buckles the size of a child’s hand.
Dr. Winthrop and his assistant gave the artificial human a dose of accelerant five times a day. And vitamins, because vitamins were important. Every night before they closed the lab, Dr. Winthrop and his assistant took a tissue culture to make sure the skin was growing properly. It always was. The assistant made a note of it.

They asked me where was home and I told them it was the space between your arms and the longitude of your spine, every vertebra mapped and memorized, more familiar even that the star maps that they'd engraved into the whorls of my brain and the whirl of my pulse. Home, I tell them, is the way you cup my neck and the way you kiss my cheek, the fit of your hips and my name on your lips. Home is you and only you, can only be you, although galaxies might line themselves like arguments between us.
The officials--effulgent colors, scarcely corporeal--confer in flashes of iridescence. Was it red for amenability, and turquoise for indecision? Or pustulant green for comprehension? They stutter between pigments and I pin my breath to the firmament of my ribs. Melody sluices from their translation boxes. I catch words out of order: dissent, despair, distrust.

The pamphlet arrives in your mailbox, sandwiched between the grocery store ads and the previous tenant's life insurance bill. The shiny, slick paper is thick between your fingers. Simple black letters on a dried-blood background say, "We Will Pay for your Time." Inside the explanation is long, scientific, boring. But the math is simple.
They will take thirty years of your life--not including weekends or holidays. They will take it in an instant, and pay you for the whole. They do not explain how. The pamphlet does not cover what they do with your time once they have it. But the number is more than you'd make in thirty years anyway. Enough to pay off your student loans, your car, your mortgage, with more than enough to live on, after. You can finally take that cruise that you've always dreamed of. You can quit your job.

Florencia Costello wouldn't leave for a trip without scrubbing the walls of the shower, vacuuming the front carpet and remaking the beds. No exceptions. Who'd want to return to dirty sheets or a filthy bath?
No one, that's who.

Novapolis was like no city Gen had ever seen in her life. The architecture flowed around her in graceful arcs and waves, all of it a gleaming white that seemed to gently press against her eyeballs. Battery pillars rose in small copses where denizens recharged their 'cycles. Glass-topped channels displayed sparkling clean water as it coursed through the blue veins of the city's filtration system. There were no engine sounds; everything powered was as soft and melodic as the whispertrain that had conducted her here in the first place.
And everywhere she looked, there were the custodians: small white spheres that moved through the air like schools of fish. One such school had been waiting for her when she stepped off the platform, welcoming her, in a synthetic chirp, to Novapolis. The custodians explained that her refugee application had been accepted and her face and body metrics had been scanned into the system. She was officially a denizen. They had offered to guide her to housing, but she'd elected to explore instead. All she had to carry was her battered violin case and the ratty backpack slung over her shoulder.

"What sort of amateur nonsense is this?" Anders asks. He holds my glasses in his left hand between thumb and forefinger.
He has the audacity to call me an amateur. Me. I take chess more seriously than any player who's made it to the world championships since Garry Kasparov.

I am rooted to the ground beneath me, stationary, a statue. The rise and fall of constellations traces broad arcs against my unblinking eyes. The memory of my body in motion sometimes seems unreal.
But other memories only become more real with the passage of time.

"No, it's broken, take your shekel," growled Jonas, giving the vending machine a final kick. He had already managed to dent the side and puncture the lower corner, but the last kick was somewhat halfhearted. He stared at the machine forlornly.
"Keep it. We may find another," said Kevin. He leaned toward the dirty plastic front. "Think you're better off. Nothing in there looks particularly fresh anymore."

When the invaders appeared, I had no choice. I lowered my head and opened my arms to greet them. Some of us tried to fight, against my warnings, but the orbiting gunships put a quick end to the resistance. I made sure everyone learned the lesson: their ships are made of guns. You cannot stop them.
They settled quickly. They took what was ours and made it theirs. I served them well, and prospered. I offered them our secrets, revealed where the riches were hidden. People spat on me on the streets. I did not care. I was alive.

Sam snapped a thick card onto the chipped-paint surface of the picnic table, between himself and Hailey. Sam studied the glossy back, the multi-colored swirl of the Race Cards logo. A thin gold line ran along the bottom. The nano-bot interface.
"Where did you get that?" Hailey asked.

The girl in the red catsuit slammed the phone down hard. "Unavailable!" she spat, gesticulating with the gun. Leonard wished she wouldn't do that--spit. There was something so forcefully biological about it. It reminded him of finding a fingernail in his food, or of other people's toddlers.

I am sitting in a chair. The Man has put me here. He rubbed my head and I thumped my tail.
I look next to me and see another man. He is also in a chair. The Man is talking to him, but he does not say my name, so what he says must not be important.

Yume sits down at the table and smiles. "I took a trip to London last night."
I keep picking away at the rice on my lunch tray, wondering what she finds funny in stupid jokes like these. She might as well have told me that the Earth was flat.

It was a new world and Willy was right smack in the middle of it. He was a janitor by trade, servicing hotels and office buildings, the chord of his vacuum slinking behind him up stairs and down hallways. People rarely saw Willy without his vacuum. That's what gave them the idea. In truth, the idea started years before. A professional baseball club owner wore a wooden leg which had a small drawer built into it, to use as an ashtray, for his chain smoking habit. It was part of him. When Willy lost his arm the same idea was applied. Only this was the year 2020 and it wasn't wood they'd be using.

My hands won't stop shaking.
Over the cheap toddler's tic-tac-toe board, my opponent stares with smoke-rheumed eyes. She's iron, my great gran, like an old battleship. She's already dropped my niece, the pigtailed doll with her once candy-red cheeks paling against the linoleum, and my second uncle on my father's side who swore in Russian as soon as he figured out how badly he'd screwed himself.

Mary had spent her entire life on the dropships. This was only her second rainstorm, and it was as terrifying and wonderful as the first has been. So much water, and so loud. She had seen them on the vids, of course, and she and Ronald had even sometimes stood in the shower and pretended to see and feel the rain, letting the water run on and on (a near criminal act on the dropships), but it hadn't been the same.
The others in the room hardly seemed to notice, even when another bolt of thunder sounded, sending tremors through her body. But then again, they hardly seemed to notice anything, the air, the way the surface constantly changed between your feet, the sunlight. They had sun equivalent light on the dropships, but that, too, hadn't been the same.

We are all but embers here, dying alone in the night. The hoods keep us docile with their soothing images and beautiful sounds, threaded through with just enough discord to keep us working, to keep us weeping at the things we have done. Serum drips into my mouth via a tube, bringing feelings of guilt and pride in equal measure. I am strong and honored to serve. I am shamed by my past and seek only to make amends. I am repulsed by my fellow prisoners, by the things that they have done. I live only to earn redemption.
All these things are lies.

There was a survivor.
Sarah heard Elena calling from across the wreckage, and saw her daughter's lantern waving in the dark and the driving rain. The sound of the storm's wild surf wafted in from the tip of the Cape a mile away. She went striding, skirts soaked, across the grass and mud of the field.

The mess hall rocked crazily as the Kraggle scum got off another lucky shot. Crewman Jase Landsdon slapped his hand over the dice to keep them from rolling off the table. "I bet fifteen hours of degreasing duty."
Crewman Rick Scalati eyed him back. "Rich bet."

She unlocks the door of your father's flat and motions you to come inside.
The landlady is mostly pleasant--sweet, yet subtle and reserved, like a stereotypical English grandmother. You realize you cannot tell where her shawl ends and where her cat begins. She leans towards you and assaults you with the smell of rosewater and cat feces. You raise a fist to your mouth to suppress a gag reflex. You really, really want to throw up, but you can't.

About midnight, the party came to a crashing halt when one of the dive team seniors arrived with a case of beer.
Izzy had a split-second to wince before dozens of iChaperones lit up in angry technicolor. They swarmed down from the ceiling to hover around the heads of their respective underage protectees, screens flashing the cutesy drink icon that alerted them to the presence of alcohol. In case that wasn't enough to convey the message, the control unit on her wrist began a continuous buzzing that sent vibrations all the way up her arm.

At first people thought it beautiful, all these new stars appearing every night. I did. I especially liked that in cities you could see the stars for the first time. So nights when I would leave the office late, I could see them on my way through downtown Chicago, blazing down between the tall, dark obelisks of buildings I drove under as much as I drove over the farmland in the second half of my drive .
But after a couple of months, when there were still more each night, when the night sky above the farm house we lived in--and were supposedly fixing up--seemed to blaze like white fire, and Wendy, when I accidentally woke her up one night at 12:15 a.m. having just arrived home, said It seems like it's hot at night, doesn't it?: after that, it didn't seem just pretty, anymore.

The day she said "I do," I saw the shape of our lives. We'd be the kind of couple who kept Sundays for ourselves, did crossword puzzles in the evenings, and gave each other lingering kisses every morning. We'd raise two kids who would go on to make the future brighter. We'd retire early, eat key lime pie for dessert every night, and watch the sun set, our wrinkled hands entwined. And I'd look into her big green eyes and remember the full-bodied giddiness that enveloped me as I replied, "Me too."

Captain Max Stone stood in the spotlight in the packed battlefield theater, extolling the virtues of courage and loyalty in the war against the Graths. This broadcast was reaching billions of people over five planets. The hot-climate uniform he was wearing served no purpose here other than to show off his deeply gnarled scars and functional, but very mechanical, prosthetics; symbols of humanity's truly brave warriors. Max pounded the podium, raised his metal fist and his voice, whipping everyone into a patriotic, Grath-hating frenzy.
This was all he was good for anymore.

It starts like this: I've just reported for an ordinary Saturday shift, exchanged nods with Khairi, and then my heart seizes. The pain lances through my rib cage. I have time to think, a heart attack? and then I collapse and don't think much at all.
But it is not a heart attack. After an eternity I realize I'm on the floor and Khairi is crouching over me, scanner in one hand, hypo in the other.

Polished, white teeth reflected the flash like tiny mirrors. Miss Verna fixated on the impartial black lens facing her. She had labored for hours on perfecting the glow of her rouge-covered cheeks; all aspects of her appearance had been carefully considered.
"Four minutes."

Ninety kilos of delicious walks the lonely trail.
Carl Alan Reinhart-Sands. He's a tourist wearing a Third Eye, plus hiking shorts and a big-brimmed safari hat along with four-star Keen boots: A new wardrobe caked in dust and infused with human stinks. This is a married man, but not for long. He and his wife filed for divorce in their home state, allowing Carl to enter that golden period when planned catastrophe allows the illusion of possibility. That's why he's made the long drive to come here. Years ago, he walked this trail with his parents and older sisters. A mountain vacation means that nobody will harp at him, telling him to smile and lose weight while acting more considerate of her feelings. What this trip brings is a taste of wilderness and the freedom to wear a gloriously goofy hat, and of course Carl intends to study the spectacular scenery. But his thoughts are mostly fixed on the women staying at the North Rim Lodge, some obviously traveling alone, and he's hoping that tonight, after a shower, he will manage to make a new friend.

Dear Editor,
Enclosed please find my story about your unfortunate demise. Understand, this is not a death threat. You really are going to die, and there's nothing either of us can do about it (which, by the way, is also not a death threat).

It seemed to Iowa as she curled up on her automod, cradling the antique cell phone, that sometimes it was better to experience things backwards. When you lived through things forwards, you had to live with the fear of what might or might not happen. When you looked backwards, though, the worst was always over.
In reverse, you could see your failed relationships and your humiliating childhood as though you'd zoomed out, as though you were floating free over a sea of distant events that no longer pertained to you. You didn't have to worry that the next person you tried to love would turn out to be even worse than the last one, or that your crazy plans might go wrong.

The box was composed of flesh: living, human, maternal.
And, inside the box, a scattering of molecular confetti, sourced from two parents, swirled and shimmered, collided and collaborated, in an innumerable array of unprecedented arrangements: every way, and no way.

Deep in the tropical rainforests of far north Queensland, two tiny cocoons hung from a thick purple fungus. The cocoon on the left began to twitch and shudder, moments later so did the other.
A split appeared in the left cocoon, and two bright yellow wings could be seen as a little butterfly slowly emerged and took a perch on the spongy purple mushroom. It was joined less than a minute later by another, as the second cocoon split and disgorged a larger red and green winged butterfly.

When the vortex comes, you will be asleep. You will not even be dreaming of your name.
When the vortex arrives you will be in a different land. It will not occur to you whether your horizons are completely or totally aligned.

Dear Parents,
It's diorama time again, and I thought I would send home a few notes for parents about this annual project. While your child is encouraged to approach this project creatively, there are a few ground rules that will help ensure success--as well as the safety of the class.

As he stopped off at Marty-Mart, Aubrey saw that someone had scrawled across the store front: Martin Paxson has only one testicle but he's a righteous dude. You can trust him.
Paying old Mr. Paxson for smokes, Aubrey tried not to laugh.

She slumped down the dirty alley, ignoring the discarded garbage, the drifts of broken things with sharp edges. She felt like a broken thing with sharp edges herself.
"You're back?" came the familiar voice. "So soon?"

It is a week after the funeral. Daniel Marsten is interrupted by the phone ringing as he reads to his young son from a book of Greek myths. He kisses the boy quickly on the forehead before rushing to get the phone. He knows it is his sister-in-law, calling about the boy. She will be arriving soon to whisk him away from this mountain retreat, and take him to a world of soccer practice, booster clubs, and lemonade stands manned in company with his cousins. She will take him away to a world where there is still a mother, even if it isn't his. Daniel convinces himself this will be enough.
The boy, whose name is Jason, and who never thinks of himself as the boy, knows it will not be. He wants to stay with his father. He loves the mountains, as his mother did, and he loves the observatory where he is not allowed to go, but which he dreams of nonetheless. He loves the stories his mother told him of scanning the night sky for stars and life and dreams. Soccer practice pales in comparison. And his father does not have to leave the mountain.

They barred the library doors today. Men in uniform stand patrol, armed and ready. Their lantern jaws are set firm, lips in a straight line. Stoic women, also armed, jog up and down the block, buttocks moving like pistons. Someone dashes from a building, a hand-held reader clutched close. Shots are fired; I don't stay to find out more.
I've packed the car with books, little room for else. It is my car, his gift to buy my silence, to make up for the bruises real and otherwise; never marry a politician who has no use for literature, has no use for a wife that does.

Sarah sips her coffee without tasting it, the last of the week's ration burning her throat. The wall monitor next to the rickety metal kitchen table blinks the time in block white letters, 05:06, much too soon for her to be awake. Her shift at the factory won't begin until eight, but she's hasn't slept well in this house since Teddy left. Too empty. Too quiet. A sense of suspense that something is happening impossibly far away while time in her deteriorating row house stands still.
Below the clock, a line blinks in urgent red. "One new message." Below that, the message header from the Adjutant General's office, with the title "Re. Theodore J. Calhoun."

She rests against a sweat-stained pillow. Hair clings to her forehead like strands of shriveled seaweed from the shrinking ocean. Everyone sweats in this dying world, but hers is the mark of exertion. Of exhaustion.
A baby sleeps in her arms. She holds its head against her shoulder and presses dried lips to its ginger hair. But her eyes, wide with interest (or is it fear?) watch her husband and his twin across the long room. He whispers to identical doctors, but the force of his hissing carries across the space as if he shouted.

***Editor's Note: Adult language in the adult story that follows***
I don't know how or why the conflict started or what our objective was. All I knew was that four guys in green uniforms came to the farm, trudged through the fields to my flock, pointed at me, and told me I was a trainee--a volunteer citizen soldier. Me, Alex Sorenson Lightfoot Hardy the Third, and, by God and the Saints of Church ElRon, a soldier. It was ridiculous. I was a shepherd, not a fighter.

Two figures appeared between two spiral galaxies, and looking neither right nor left at so common a view, the Chief Philosopher remarked, "I cannot believe I've permitted this profligate wasteful project to continue for so long." He wiggled his dark brows, an atavism that he'd carefully engineered to heighten an already fierce visage appropriate to the Imperator of all Humankind and High and Low Justice in One.
Zeron, the Supreme Scientist, Single Leader of All Man's Scientific Endeavor, and Coordinator of All Knowledge, nodded sagely at the criticism. "One cannot deny it has be such an immense an effort, Xeres. But we've had our reasons for continuing the effort."

This is a science fiction story about the day after tomorrow.
No aliens will arrive on Earth to enlighten or enslave us. There will be no traveler from the future warning of impending Armageddon. No shadowy government agency will reveal unheard of technologies, a secret new space plane or spy drone or stealth ship. Absolutely nothing of that sort will occur.

Freefall was the best part of a jump.
As she fell, Gina Wright looked down at Earth, half shadowed beneath her as dawn crept toward her landing target in Kansas, and relished the knowledge that she was about to demolish the world freefall record by more than 20,000 miles. This was going to be so much better than her spacejump from the old International Space Station. She would have forty minutes of freefall before she even entered the atmosphere.

The boy scratched his chin. He nodded to himself; then he moved a group of pieces a few centimeters on the board. Seconds later, the computer reacted by rearranging the opposing force into two separate, smaller groups. The boy thought this was a good sign. He would know better after two or three more moves.
Philip used to play the game frequently with his father. His father was a great strategist--he taught Philip well. His father had praised Philip's skills. Philip was an exceptional player--especially for one so young. Indeed, at eight years of age, he could outplay most adults. He wished his father were still alive so that they could play the games together.

It happened between the space of one breath and the next. Focus, the instructor had said as the teletroopers lined up for their solo jump. Concentrate on where you want to go, and make the jump.
Ashley had closed her eyes, stepped on the teleport platform. Deep breath. She touched the neural-interface on her headgear to reassure herself it was still there, then hit the jump key. But in the moment everything faded away, as she was disassembled piece by piece, the doubt and the panic and the fear welled up in her throat--I can't do this, I'm not ready for a solo jump--

The news first came to the Old Mother through her feet. She leaned forward to rest more weight on the cartilaginous nodes within her padded front feet to create a solid connection with the earth, the better to receive the seismic signals that traveled through the bedrock beneath the gentle rolling grasslands of the Highveld. A muscle in each of her large African ears constricted, dampening the acoustic signals carried by the soft winds, allowing her to concentrate on the vibrations below. Through the rich earth, she sensed the steady movement of the other elephant family, the other half of her bond group. They were on the march, a full day's journey from here. Although she could not hear it at that great distance, she knew that the other family's Old Mother must have trumpeted her distress. Nevertheless, the ground vibrations did not resonate fear or alarm. No, it was grief.
"You must join us. We have lost a friend."

It was another day in the ____(ADJECTIVE)____ Empire. Our Hero served them, not that he'd ever trusted _____(POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY)____. But you lived the choices they gave you. That attitude didn't give him much meaning, but it did place him in command.
Of course, not everyone agreed. There were rebels. Champions of ____(ANOTHER POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY)____. Our Hero didn't ask too many questions. He was gruff and worldly like that. He took his team down to the ____(TYPE OF ECOSYSTEM)____ planet.

At around ten pm in the Lincoln West Bunker, five miles from the front, radio operator Mike Jackson leapt from his seat so fast he tore the headphone jack clear from the console.
"Jesus Mike," said Private Schwartz, who was the only other person present in the cramped and darkened room.

I killed a man today.
I didn't do it on purpose. It was a mistake. I mean, I meant to kill him--I put my gun to his head and pulled the trigger, there was no mistake there--but when I cut out his heart, I realized that I had killed a human being.

Tiffany forced a reassuring smile onto her face. "We're just going to feed the ducks," she told the nurse. "I promise I'll take her straight to the park and back. There won't be any trouble."
The nurse raised an eyebrow at Tiffany. "There better not be. And be back before tea, do you hear?"

The morning after the storm, the boy heads to the beach in search of scraps. The sun casts a soft glow across the seashore, transforming murky beach sediment into a kaleidoscopic splattering of color--reds and yellows, greens and blues, a rainbow of plastiglomerate fragments flashing in the light, like flecks of paint strewn across a canvas of sand.
The boy watches the rippling colors dance beneath the water's roiling surface as wave after muddy wave unfolds over the shore. His eyes study the back-and-forth cadence, a rhythm accompanying the twirling flurry of loose plastiglomerate sediment.

After the earthquake, Steven drove to his grandmother's house to check on her. He knew the damage was bad the moment he walked in the door. The entryway tiles were covered in a puddle of spilled memories--a week in the hospital, his grandfather's last ragged breaths, the funeral service in the pouring rain. The iridescent sheen of the memories was dotted with shards of broken glass.
So many memories lost, all because his grandmother had used vases instead of something more sensible. He'd tried to talk her into metal, but she liked to look at the delicate swirls of color in the memories. Plastic was completely out of the question, too tacky to put on display.

You do not know me yet, my love, but I can hear you in my future. You are there from the beginning--at first just a few stray notes, but your presence quickly grows into a beautiful refrain. I wish you could hear time as I do, my love, but this song was never meant to be heard. The future should be chronobviated, gathered up in feathery pink fronds with delicate threads that waver in and out of alternate timelines. The past should be memographed, absorbed into a sturdy gray tail that stretches back to the beginning of the universe. We humans have neither fronds nor tails, but when the Eternals wanted to talk to us, they found a way to work around that.

My family's bridge is four generations old. The outer surfaces are bleached white from the suns, but our nesting caverns are still the same warm gold I remember from my youth. It takes half a day to crawl from end to end, and the apex boasts a view of the southern sea. My ancestors built this bridge with mineral-laden spit that dries as hard as bone. It will last for many generations, but the pond beneath the bridge is shrinking, leaving white rings of salt as the water level drops. When the water is gone, we'll be exposed to predators, and already there is not as much algae as there once was.
The time has come to migrate.

Published on Jul 27, 2017

Send Feedback to Daily Science Fiction

Please send us feedback on how we can improve
our web site to best meet your needs:

Please optionally enter your email address
if you'd like a reply to this feedback: